Monday, January 10, 2011

Adventures of a Misfortunate Bronx Kid or Almost Being Raped by a Maintenance Man and Other Crazy Shit That Happened to Me as a Kid.

When I started this thing, this whole web site, blog, journal thing, I mentioned I would get into some stories from any and everywhere I could think of.
Probably not in those exact words, but I'm too lazy to scroll down and check what the hell I originally typed to get an accurate quote, so let's not focus on details and quoting and shit like that, but instead, let's focus on the actual work, a story I probably mentioned somewhere along this site, about almost being raped by a maintenance man and other crazy shit that happened to me as a kid.

Actually, as I type this, I still haven't thought of a title for this little piece, so for now, I'm going to call it "Almost Being Raped by a Maintenance Man and Other Crazy Shit That Happened to Me as a Kid.".
If I can't think of a better title by the time I finish, then that's what we're going to stick with, because sometimes, a title doesn't have to be all clever and witty and shit, it just has to be honest.
I made that up just now too.
I can be pretty profound when I need to be, I just don't like to do it all the time because then people want to quote and paraphrase your shit and have you sign autographs on their tits and offer you handjobs on the subway platform at three AM on a Tuesday, or they ask for a bowl of your semen, it’s just a cluster fuck of situations that I don't like to get involved with, so don't fucking bring it up again.

Moving on, let us begin our journey through time, circa, 198-something, maybe 85-87, somewhere around that time frame, I honestly can't remember because I try to block out most of this stuff so I don't wake up at night in a puddle of my own tears, urine and feces and/or with a gun in my mouth mumbling the lyrics to "Sister Christian".

For the earlier part of my childhood, I grew up as a free spirited soul, able to pretty much do whatever I wanted or go wherever I wanted due to alcohol, drugs and the effect they caused on whatever part of your brain that is responsible for "adult supervision and responsibility over children".
Now , I'm not a biologist in any way, but I'm almost certain it's the Medulla Oblongata, only because it's probably the only part of the brain that I know of other than the Cerebral Cortex, which coincidentally, is my second choice here.

Anyway, being a kid of the streets, along with my older brother, we'd get into some shit.
For the most part, I'd get into my own adventures, and he'd get into his.
His were mostly playing sports and having fun with an occasional fight, while mine were mostly getting into fights with an occasional near death experience and/or attempted rape.
The times we did join forces, we always ended up sharing experiences like no other.

We were little kids, maybe somewhere around age six through eight, and like most kids our age, we were supposed to go to school at around 8 or 9 am daily, but instead, sometimes we said "fuck school" and ended up just walking around the Bronx and getting into shit.
I remember one day, we were joined by two other dudes from my brother's class.
The four of us, we tried sneaking into a nearby building through the back entrance , which was accessible through a gate that led into an alleyway, a little path that was surrounded by concrete and bricks that superintendents would use to ship garbage to and from the compactor room and the sidewalk as easily as possible.
Something like this:

But felt more like this:

Here we are, fucking around in this back area when I decided to take a piss, along with another guy in our crew who also had to do pee pee.
I'm relaxed, draining the main vein, not a care in the world, when out of nowhere, this 40 something, dark (Black, maybe Hispanic, who cares?) man with his brown leather jacket on, jumps out of the fucking shadows, kicks me square in the ass and then hits me in the back with a broom stick,
My heart tries to forcefully come out through my anus, meanwhile I'm literally pissing my pants and my legs and whatnot as I begin to fucking run as fast as my little pissed on legs could take me, while this dark man with the brown jacket motherfucker, he's chasing us , he's hooting and hollering curses and threats of how he's going to kill us if he ever sees us again as we haul ass and finally make it out of his basement entrance, running for our motherfucking lives , hearts beating like jackhammers, making our way away from that place while the cold air settles against my wet clothing.
Oh man, I had so much piss on myself, I can still remember my legs feeling gritty like I had sand on them because the skin around my legs had sort of water (read: piss) logged and now that I think of it, I don't actually remember stopping to piss, I think I stopped, and the rest of the pissing happened when he jumped out of nowhere like Count fucking Dracula.
God, I should go back and kill "the man with the Brown jacket", who he was affectionately referred to as after this encounter.
Needless to say, we never fucking went back to his basement again, ever, and we walked back to school with our scared shitless selves, pissy pants, raw skin and all.

Another time, probably with the same crew from above, we decided to go on a journey to one of the guys' houses after school one day.
One of these geniuses had the bright idea of cutting through a field of debris caused by condemned buildings and abandoned construction jobs, pretty much like this:

This is how the Bronx looked back in the 70's and 80's, it was pretty fucking desolate.
So here we are, taking this shortcut, along the way, we see this building with an interesting little "cut from the earth" type of design to it, looked sort of like this:

So two of us, myself and this other kid, we decide to hop down to another spooky, concrete basement type of area (We never learn, and kids, stay the fuck out of basements, especially ones made from concrete and maintained by Hispanic people of the Bronx) to frolic about and explore while my older brother and his other friend waited above.
Those two, Pussies?
Yes.
Stupid?
Nope.

We're here, this other dude and myself, just wandering about in this basement, when we hear a door unlock, then creak open when out comes this spooky fat Hispanic dude who was more than likely the maintenance guy and looked like a murderer and was probably about as safe as a gynecologist with penises for fingers.
That's when we decided to jet the fuck out of there, but in our hasty retreat, my friend dropped his book bag as we scampered up the concrete wall back to the top where the junkyard was.

The fat Latin fellow, who was stuck in his little basement palace, didn't appear to be able to physically climb the rocks, so we were safe from his wrath, our dilemma was that he had this kid's backpack.
We pleaded with the guy to toss it back up, but he kept telling us to come back down and get it, in his soft, gentle voice, that sounded like Rainbows speaking and cottony soft Cottonelle tissue wiping my ass, suitable for a killer.
We told him "please, just toss it up and we'll leave" and he said "don't worry, come down and get it, its ok, come down".
As we gave up all hope and were about to leave, he finally figured he wasn't going to get a child for dinner and tossed it up, then we left, assumably preventing the rape of a child that day, most likely my own, because those brave souls would have surely shoved my little ass into the basement to save their own asses.

Before I close out, I'd like to add one more adventure to the list of "Adventures I'd rather not have had as a kid".
I remember playing in the courtyard of my old building, which looked like the Carter building from "New Jack City", located between 170 and 171 streets on Grand concourse, in the Bronx.
I was with a "friend" at the time, or whatever you called a kid you'd play with once, just playing in the dirt , because if you brought toys outside, someone would try to steal them, so we're sitting there playing, when this little kid comes out of the building nearest us asking if we wanted to make some money.
Being the young opportunists that we were, fuck yes we wanted to make some money!
So the kid says to follow him, and we do, as he leads us into the building, up some stairs and into this apartment on the third floor.
We walk in and there's this chubby brown fellow sitting on a bar stool, he tells the escort kid to close the door, as my friend and I walk in towards the back of the living room of this small, one bedroom apartment.
The door was directly opposite the back of the living room, I could see it, maybe about 10 feet from me, and there was a window directly behind me, facing Taft High School.
So the perceivably kind businessman asks us if we want to make some money.
We're all stoked and excited and are all smiles saying "YEAH!", and then our host smiles, slowly reaching to the area on the other side of his bar stool, grabbing something long that took a few seconds to pull up and that's when this sweet charming fellow suddenly pulls out this double barreled shotgun that looked about as big as I was and held it over his shoulder, telling us that in order to make money, we would have to drop our pants.
I immediately felt this sense of fear loom over me, and couldn't figure out what to do as he pointed the shotgun towards me.
Do I just drop my pants?
Do I try to run?
Do I run towards the door or out the window?
What should I do?
As I tried to decide, fortune would smile upon me.
In the distance, across the courtyard, I hear my mother calling for me, yelling "BRYAN!”
I told the shotgun holding guy who clearly wasn't making a very good business proposition here "That's my mom, I gotta go!" and ran for the door faster than a bolt of lightning, leaving my friend behind to a fate I'd never know of because I don't even remember seeing that kid again after that.
I ran to my mom and later that day, told her the whole story.

A few days later, she'd approach this man as I pointed him out and she would go on to threaten his life, saying if he ever tried anything like that again, she would literally murder him.
He just kept saying "it wasn't me, right Bryan? It wasn't me!" and now that I think of it, I have no clue how he knew my name, unless my mom let it slip.

Needless to say, I had an interesting childhood, these were just some of the more colorful moments that stood out to me, and have never escaped my memory.

I'm glad too, because not everything afterwards was as exciting and this always makes for good conversation.
I can also proudly say that I was never raped or murdered by any random brown skinned Hispanic maintenance men, so yay for me.

2 comments:

fucking crazy man i didn't know about the shotgun guy but i knew about the creepy basement guy with the brown jacket. i wish that guy with the shotgun was around today we should find him and fucking kill him! lol